Congress is in recess, actual recess with no pro forma sessions.  Barack Obama can recess appoint people.  Tomorrow Ed DeMarco could cease to be acting director of the FHFA (Federal Housing Finance Agency).  I think that Obama should, indeed must, recess appoint Mel Watt to be FHFA director. As acting director DeMarco has blocked all […]

In his Defending the One Percent paper, Greg Mankiw is rather grudgingly acknowledging rent-seeking (and -getting) in the financial industry, and the allocation of top talent to that industry. He sez: The last thing we need is for the next Steve Jobs to forgo Silicon Valley in order to join the high-frequency traders on Wall Street. […]

As I discussed last week, U.S. median wealth per adult is lower than many other countries. To be exact, it comes in at #27 for 2012, at $38,786 per adult. This is more than 1/4 lower than had been reported by Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Databook for 2011. I contacted one of the authors, Professor […]

Via Mark Thoma Economist’s View comes this note on credit rating company incentives: While the US Department of Justice did not give any statistical evidence in its deposition, our new research (Efing and Hau 2013) suggests that rating favors were indeed systematic and pervasive in the industry. In a sample of more than 6,500 structured […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: California Assembly Bill 880 (pending) It was a no brainer to predict Obamacare would have a major impact on restaurant and retail employers, especially in the throes of a weak economy. The composition of the work forces and often slim margins guarantee problems. Darden Corp. (Red Lobster […]

Political Calculations gives us this chart of median new home prices versus median incomes over the last 46 years. The rising tip at the upper right (!) is May 2013. What do you think: sustainable? Here’s the zoomed-in version of recent years, from inside the red dashes: As they say, …new homes are, virtually by definition, at the […]

U.C.-Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu’s nomination to the Ninth Circuit Court of appeals was killed a couple years ago by Senate Republicans upon the pretext that Lui had trashed Alito to the Senate Judiciary Committee in testimony during Alito’s confirmation hearing.  Lui predicted that Alito as a justice would be exactly what Alito as a […]

Robert Pollin is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He is the founding co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). This is via Real News: I want to refer to an article that was in the global–the leading global financial newspaper The Financial Times last week by one of their […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Cap per Procedure Some employer health plans are experimenting with a cap-per-procedure system, allowing $X for a certain procedure and forcing employees to pay any difference. This is not as harsh for employees as it first sounds, as the plans are using this as leverage to cap fees […]